Uncivil Savant Podcast (Caroline Ross)

Welcome to the first of the podcast-hosted audios of all Uncivil Savant posts, so they can all live in one place, for easier listening. After over a year of weekly audio versions of posts, since first publishing on Substack, it seemed a good idea to use the podcast feature for those who always prefer to listen, rather than read my work.

As time progresses I hope to add other audio and musical extras.

For now, welcome. I hope you enjoy these posts and catch up on some you may have missed. Feel free to share them.

January 28th 2024.

There is a line in a quatrain by Rumi often rendered as, ‘There are a thousand ways to pray’. But it literally reads, ‘There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground’.

How much of life goes missing when we speak only of disembodied ideas? Replaying the words of a prayer as a voice in our heads is not the same as lowering our bodies to the earth and placing our mouths softly against it. Feeling glad that Scottish country dancing is still popular is not the same as regularly hurtling through ‘Strip the Willow’ with kids and elders.

Below I have expanded upon a letter I wrote to one of the students who wished to get to the heart of their practice and to another person who wondered, if we have been subject at home or in the wider culture to such severe deception that we cannot trust our inner knowing, what can we do? (I have changed their names to one: Mariam, so as not to infringe their privacy.)

Published here with full transcript, notes and more images, November 28th 2022.

If you want to quieten your mind do this: go to the river and stare at the surface, do not allow your eyes to move at all...

Published here with transcript, notes and more images, November 24th 2022.

True wildness…

Published here with full transcript, November 30th 2022.

The piece below for Dark Mountain Issue 8 Technê was my first essay published in a book, or indeed anywhere other than on the T'ai Chi school blog which I started in 2005. Thankfully, it was edited down by Steve Wheeler from a rambling sprawl to this short essay, where I attempt to get to some of the deeper aspects of Chuang Tzu's wonderful teaching story. I have updated it very slightly for you today. I recommend getting Thomas Cleary's Taoist Classics Volume 1 for his masterful translations, but other renditions of the story are available to read immediately online if you search 'Cook Ting'…

Published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 5th 2022.

This piece is a response to a recent essay by Rhyd Wildermuth and an opportunity to expand on a letter to my friend Dougald Hine . I’ll raise the case for haptic richness over the tyranny of frictionless surfaces, show how our ancestors left us plenty of medicine in unlikely places, and suggest that there is no time, or at least no linear time, in the palm of your hand. For help from Blake, my mother’s sewing kit and a German biker, plus several contrasting photos featuring my hands, press play.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 12th 2022.

Winter Solstice approaches and I am packing to go and see dear friends and beloved family over Solstice and Christmas, both of which I celebrate. I wanted to post something special for you, so here is one of my all-time favourite teaching stories, a Taoist parable, if you like. Make yourself a cup of tea, no matter if it’s finest jasmine, oolong, Yorkshire Tea with milk, or Barry’s Tea if you’re in Ireland, (ah, the golden elixir…) then, press play.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 19th 2022.

Join me appreciating plant kin this Yule, while I enjoy with family the flavours and scents of tannin-rich oak, cloves, raisins, mint and bay in our festive food, plus lashings of tea, of course. My gratitude to the plant kingdom has no end. When you raise your glass or cup, it likely contains blessed polyphenols… They, and we, are steeped in meaning.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 26th 2022.

Seemingly endless rain is lashing down on old England as my friends in New England write describing snowdrifts many feet deep in their ‘once in a hundred years’ storm. I am away in London for New Year, spending the evening peacefully alone by choice, reading, meditating and bringing you this piece.

A year ago I wrote to my friend Dougald, having just found words for a rebellion in me against the disdain I sensed in descriptions of ordinary people, (especially ordinary women), in much contemporary political writing, with which I might otherwise have sympathy. It still stands. Disdain is the barely-polite face of dehumanisation. This New Year I reaffirm my openness to unsolicited friendly greetings, ‘pointless’ sentences exchanged about looming clouds, shared laughter and almost talismanic weather forecasts with strangers as we duck into shop doorways to avoid the next deluge of a coastal Sou’westerly. Good weather to you, both inner and outer.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 2nd 2023.

In October 2015 many forces came together in my life, the remaining ripples of which began to settle last year, when I turned 50. Looking back, over 7 years later, I see threads emerging that are now woven into my writing and art life, including here at Uncivil Savant.

I want to share something of those beginnings with you, to allow a better understanding of how I came to be exploring this territory, and why I care so deeply about the embodied life as a gateway to wisdom, equal and complementary to paths of scholarship or faith.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 16th 2023.

Today I want to write about tempering.

Years ago I went to make a knife with the skilful Devon blacksmith and experimental archaeologist Dave Budd. Two days working flint with renowned knapper Anthony Whitlock had felt approachable to my hands as it required only short, momentary percussion and careful intent to make a serviceable blade. Working with fire and steel was another matter…

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 23rd 2023.

I am taking a break from writing essays this week. Instead, here’s a poem from the autumn in France, an ochre story and a recent painting. I hope you enjoy them.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 30th 2023.

At 1am on 4th February, after a full 90 minute cycle of good deep sleep, I was awoken by the image of a vast bog or marsh, stretching between two conical mountains, such as found in the water-lands of Sutherland, in the far north of Scotland. But my mind was in the sphagnum moss and bog myrtle, not on the heathered high mountain sides. Over the next minutes a response flooded out of me to a question I have been asking myself for a few months now, about the predicament we find ourselves in, here in the Hubriscene Age.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, February 6th 2023.

I was finally able to download and edit this recording made by Dougald Hineof Iain McGilchrist and me talking at his home last week. I first wrote to Iain in December 2010 to thank him for his book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ and to relay its profound effect upon my life, understanding of T’ai Chi and the Tao, and its beneficial outward rippling effect in my and my teacher’s T’ai Chi schools.

First published here with notes and more images, February 15th 2023.

My friend Martin is a woodsman. Last year he felled lots of western hemlock, unsuited to the wood in Devon where it was planted a few decades ago. Now, misshapen trunk by slightly rotten trunk, some of these failed trees are being laid carefully into peaty land on Dartmoor, damming drainage ditches dug by ‘improvers’, so that the land may once again hold its full quota of life-giving water. The sight of heaths and moorlands burning here in England last summer was an awful one, these landscapes famous for their wetness underfoot hosting multitudes of water-loving plant species, insects, amphibia and birds, had been drained, compacted and dried out. At last they were set ablaze, mostly by accident but sometimes by arson. The plan is that these transported, transplanted, now supine trees will make good guardians of soils and rainwater as they slowly return to earth.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, February 20th 2023.

The temperature dropped below freezing that night in the woods, and my usual late spring camping set up wasn’t enough. In the small hours, I donned every item of spare clothing I had, including my huge rain cape, and squeezed back into my sleeping bag, shivering. I finally got up just after dawn to the May-time sounds of birds, seemingly annoyed at my presence in the clearing. This was after a pre-dawn hour of a tawny owl (unironically and loudly) calling the koan, ‘Who, who?’ directly above my tent. Needless to say, I did not gain sudden enlightenment.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, February 27th 2023.

While I begin diving into the reading needed for future essays, I have been enjoying many other writers here, as we all grapple with the Machine, and how it famously co-opts our attention. I particularly valued Pilgrims in the Machine‘s excellent recent piece. It prompted me to publish this essay I wrote in November last year, as it is not only technology which keeps us separate from our hearts and each other. The Machine certainly seems to have a will of its own now, but it was originally born from a split in the human psyche, (and from fundamentally misconstruing the modes of our bicameral brains.) In this piece, none of the distractions, nor my inability to be fully present, are attributable to ‘outside factors’ such as pervasive attention harvesting technologies, like smartphones, (unless you count the whole of one’s society and upbringing as ‘outside’, which I don’t, really.)

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, March 6th 2023.

Here are some things for you, continuing broad themes from the last few months, in one of my semi-regular breaks from essaying. First, a poem and some avian drawings. Then a letter to a friend from a very strange week spent dog and cat sitting for rich Londoners, while trying to make ends meet, both from 2018. Lastly, I press a mixtape into your sweaty palm whilst mumbling something about ‘Brian Eno’s amazing harmony vocals on this one…’

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, March 13th 2023.

Correct mind intent, plus physical repetition over time, equals practice.

Or, ‘If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training’.1

Below is something I wrote as a practice aide-memoire for myself in 2018, then adapted for my students a few years ago, and have returned to this weekend though necessity. It’s been a hard week, not only for myself, but for several of my loved ones. The way this shows up for me is blinding headaches, my organism is very straightforward and unsubtle in expressing distress these days, which I appreciate. Non-mysterious pain is always instructive, whether it comes from oneself or from others, (and there is not always a distinction to be made). Many people harm themselves by making sure others will attack them. I have certainly done this. How unsatisfying is the feeling of righteousness as the eviction notice arrives!

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, March 20th 2023.

Begin. Open a space with your intent, like you do when you dream. Take all the care and love and unmet desire that you have, and right now in your mind’s eye roll it up into a tight ball as though of sharp-scented herb leaves. Now compress that for 40 million years, which will take the length of 4 breaths. Then see as it turns from coal to jet to diamond under necessity’s fierce pressure. OK, now you have a sharp, rough diamond and you can make a crack in anything with it. Including the edifice of ordinary mind, the brittle panes of racing mundane thoughts, or that stone case you get around your heart when your anger wields its cleverness like a club. 

Here is a jewel. It is also a hammer to make those cracks. A vajra. 

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, March 27th 2023.

How I see what is really there, what is not there, and what it has cost me.

When I was a young child I saw shapes and colours around things and on things that were not the same as the shapes and colours of things. This was not the consensus view, but no-one bothered to tell me off about it. Had they, it would have ceased immediately, as I was terrified of censure. If I was wrong, surely I was unlovable?

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, April 3rd 2023.

I am typing this just after packing to go to the bay I first wrote about online at Dark Mountain in 2018, when I made rock art for the cover of issue 13. I am also gently planning a pilgrimage to walk with two friends in a year or so to St Wite’s Spring, her church and reliquary in Whitchurch Canonicorum, and to Abbotsbury, on the Fleet, the site of the world’s largest tended flock of wild swans. Easter blessings from the south coast of this archipelago.

It gets harder to come back from the place of no words

Without access to sea edge and forest there are many thoughts I can’t have and many kinds of silence, too. Sensation, movement and perception roll along without words and take on the green tinge of leaf or the glint of grey flint. Last week the cove remade me in its image - tidal thoughts, harder, durable stone ideas, softer yet more tenacious seaweed feelings. Irascible mind chatter flies past, as persistently as the gulls diving for morsels. The calling pigeon of ordinary mind alights, perches, flaps dramatically overhead (in the head?) Then a sudden change of cadence - de derr derr de derr - momentarily stops, and the world with it.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, April 17th 2023.

This week, while I settle into the refuge of the roads in USA, I’ll share something from my archive. This piece was originally commissioned for Dark Mountain 22 - ARK, and returns us once more to the shore. I have added photos and a map. I hope you enjoy it. See you next week with something new.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, April 24 2023.

The embodied life

For me, even though I write almost every day, a hearty physical life is non-negotiable. There are thoughts I can’t have and feelings I can’t reach without access to the green. Similarly, I may be well in myself and reasonably fit, but if I spend whole days glued to the screen, I end up jittery and stiff, even if I don’t watch or read anything untoward. It is not only the timbre of what I see that affects me deeply, but the medium. Since the day before the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, I have not watched television or video news of any kind, only reading print, or online text based news with static photos. I would say that I am mildly averse to all video except well-made television programmes or feature films. Most of what I see online is text, and for the last year, most of the best of that has been here on Substack.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 1st 2023.

Here are three poems that feel right for this moment. The first is a glimpse of how I write or draw and brings a recurring childhood dream and menopause together. The second gathers all my gathering into one place and queries the compulsion I have to unearth. The final one, from last autumn, is about class, and seems apt given the aristocratic shenanigans in my home country this weekend. I am 5000 miles away, and happily so.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 3rd 2023.

Today I wanted to give you something really useful that took me years to develop and hone, but has been proved effective by many people who have tried it.

Over fifty artists, writers and T’ai Chi colleagues have used this practice to feed into their work or to gain connection to a wellspring of unconscious creativity. I hope it is of benefit to you. Please do get in touch if it is.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 15th 2023.

This weekend sees 6 months since I began to write here on Substack. You can read my first post again as to why I started, but why I’ll continue, and what I hope to cover, is the subject of this post. First I’d like to thank all of you who read this and subscribe, whether paid or free, and to all of you who post such interesting comments. I always read them all. I had no idea that I would find a readership of even 150 people, let alone 1500, so thanks again for your continued interest in my obscure Venn diagram of subject matter.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 22nd 2023.

This week, a letter between gods, from January 2018. The verbatim account of an everyday yet mythic encounter in a bank in Wimbledon in November 2017. A poem / lost song from 1999. All alongside new works from my drawing desk, this May.

I am home, floating strangely between jetlag and the task of levigating deep blood red ochre for my next class. Wish me luck, as I am not yet quite here, nor still there.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 29th 2023.

What sets them apart from us is twofold. Firstly, their remarkable lives or deaths. Secondly, that their lives are no longer their own. A saint’s life is for us, far more than any monarch, minister or hero, who usually have a hand in how their story is spun. In death, saints’ lives are plucked up to be placed into the common basket of goodness, to become apples of instruction. Or at least they were, until knowledge and study of the lives of saints fell away in almost every faith to make way for the inspection of the lives of the famous. Why should a contemporary woman such as myself have anything to say about this Saxon Christian saint?

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, June 5th 2023.

A change

Twenty feet outside my window, the chestnut, oak and pollard lime trees sway. For over a month this coast, whose trees habitually bow their heads and turn their backs to a prevailing sou’westerly, has experienced cold, insistent winds from the east. This happened last year, too. Despite the sunshine, whitecaps rise in the sheltered bays, swimmers huddle in the surf, eyeing their expensive Dryrobes, wistfully. I am sitting at my desk, facing west, feeling something shift - inside? Outside? Probably both.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, June 12th 2023.

I am freshly returned from my favourite woods in the world, the woods near Stonehenge that I know and love best. I have my ‘forest face’ back, softer, though perhaps grimier, than my ‘town face’. I have been coming here since 2015, according to the kit packing lists file on my laptop, though it seems like longer. Here, I gather chalk dug by badgers for my art and paints, pignuts for nibbling, chicken of the woods fungi for meals, hazel for carving box lids and gourd stoppers; in fact, everything I need to be more at home in the outdoors. This week I awoke to a wild chorus each day of song thrush, wren, chaffinch, blackcap, goldcrest, treecreeper, wood pigeon, robin, chiff chaff, blackbird, great tit, long tailed tit, spotted flycatcher, blue tit, siskin and marsh tit. Oh, and the odd rook and crow, of course. As the last light fell each night, muntjac deer barked in the woods and a tawny owl ‘whoo’ed me. Whoo, indeed.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, June 19th 2023.

The bioavailability of nutrients to the body is like the mytho-availablity of earth to the soul. Without regular physical contact to the ground, stories untether and become fragmentary, denatured, even toxic. We cleave to the broken parts like children hoarding rounded flints, not knowing it’s the sharp edges that spark fire from steel. Those sharp edges that can also do the cutting. If you are going to hoard flint, then go to Grimes Graves and ask to dig a big nodule, take it home whole and turn it over for a year, looking for the fractures, the ways in (to the stone, and to the story). Then, maybe, if you hit it just right, you’ll cleave off a flake good enough to flay your enemies, or skin your dinner, at least.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, June 26th 2023.

I have been thinking about thinking. This is nothing new. A couple of decades doing T’ai Chi with the cotton-slippered elephant in the room being my own tedious thoughts going round and round was, as you can imagine, educational. Over the years I have approached the use of words by the mind in several distinct ways, some methods were classical meditation techniques taught by my teacher or learned from books. Others were ways which evolved naturally, or which were passed on by friends. Yet others were what the woods and the water told me to do, or what Dreaming Caro advised. Below I am going to write about what we can do when we are exhausted by our own minds, especially by intrusive, discursive thoughts (as opposed to useful, bounded, clear thinking).

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, July 3rd 2023.

Once, everywhere, the land was storied.

Here is where uncle Joe met your auntie, this is where we rest the sheep during the droving, here is where we found the best cherries, on that hill is where our ancestors made a vow… My late nan told me about Bealach na Ba, the Pass of the Cattle, high above Applecross in the west of the Scottish Highlands, how she had seen other farmers drive a herd down from the heights to the village below, followed by one of the first motorcars to make it over the pass. 1

We know the story of how the link between land and humans was broken, in many places and in many times, right up to the present moment. We may know all about the history of extraction of both the goodness and the people from the land. But I have a strong feeling that one of the ways we can give back to land is to hear the stories it tells us, to keep them, share them, and tell them in the places they are from, whether exact locations, accurate to the puddle, or more generally, in the county or country. Sometimes to tell them widely, to share the goodness stored in them. Of course we can research place, and dig deep into the record, tell ‘real’ stories. But we can also feel for the poetic truth of land and make prose, poems, or dramaturgical work that speaks not only to and of human people, but the non human people, too.

There is a saying in the Taoist Classics: ‘The Sage is sick of being sick of sickness.’

Well, I am no sage, but I have been sick. I am as well, physically, as I have ever been, but I have been experimenting with many aspects of life this year, sometimes mindfully, sometimes by accident, and both ways have taught me, and continue to teach me, a huge amount.

In a living culture, we would have elders to ask about how our discoveries could enrich our community, plus we could ask advice. Instead, I have my gut, good friends, siblings and books. But none of these make up for a lack of real elders, regular community practice, or contemplative time spent alone in nature.

Let me explain. I have gone without formal ‘practice’ for 10 days. No T’ai Chi, no chi kung, no Heart Work, no ‘meditation’, no hand crafts, no reading the Classics, or similar, no hermit time in a hut. In short, 3/4 of the things which keep me sane and well have been absent from my physical and psychic diet since I was last at T’ai Chi class, and more generally, for 3 months. This week I have been surrounded by loving family, eating nutritious food, and walking in beautiful places, such as the Ochil hills in Scotland. So, food, family, stunning landscapes and love are in abundance.

And yet…

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, June 17th 2023.

I have been thinking lots about boundaries, edges and limits, partly around the use of electronics, my engagement with ‘the machine’, and my own personal energy. There have been some good posts over the last few months from several writers I follow here about their own need for, and strategies around, such things. I have found this a fertile and timely area of reading, and have a few thoughts to add to the collective mulling-over of this somewhat gritty topic. Last week, demonstrating making paint from badger-dug chalk, local red ironstone and some liquid gum Arabic, all pulled from a homemade basket, the audience could have been forgiven for thinking I live in some sylvan glade with little birds for helpers. And although that is occasionally the case, most of the time my work happens because I have been active online, letting people know what I am up to, where I am teaching, details of my book, writing this newsletter, or other screen-based activity. That’s the nature of being a self-employed artist or writer in 2023, which I am sure many of you will know first-hand.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, July 24th 2023.

Time has flown and Uncivil Savant has taken its own shape. When I draw, no matter if I have very specific plans for a piece, the ink, paper and brush always conspire to make a far more interesting and lively, if sometimes unexpected, translation of the movements of my hand, (and by inference, the movements of my unconscious, as well as my so-called conscious will). Thankfully, the same happens with writing. Although I am still tapping away at a keyboard rather than writing long-hand, if I relax and get the tension of the inner strings just right, not too tight, not too loose, unexpected resonances and overtones have a chance to vibrate in the words on this glowing screen.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, July 31st 2023.

One day the internet will fail

First come family and friends, the bushel of people I love most. When my world suddenly changed and I came home to roost a mile from my birthplace, I realised instinctively that rebuilding a meaningful life came from committing to love and being loved by this group of people, and that other goodness would flow from this. I had tried to please or placate, control or ignore people and things in pretty much every combination and situation an adult life could offer, and I had exhausted both myself and my options. In making one simple, radical, decision to uncentre my self2 and to reorient towards being-in-relation, often with my actual blood relatives, I was set free.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, August 7th 2023.

When I started this Substack I regularly included pieces expanded from my ongoing practice of writing to, and thinking with, friends, which is, apart from discussions at the table with food and wine, my favourite mode of meaning-making. It’s time for another recent instalment culled from my trusty ancient Hotmail account, that tireless μεταφορά (removals, transporter, metaphor…) machine.

I have removed anything personal to my correspondent, my friend Nicholas Wilkinson, added links and tidied the grammar somewhat, but as usual, I feel it is better left in its original, rather rambling, epistolary shape. Sometimes I feel like an eccentric gardener in the feral edges of the thought garden others have generously cultivated in the world. So here's me bringing you some wild fruit from the margins. Compost it or make jam as you see fit. It’s that season, after all.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, August 21st 2023.

It was twenty past ten and the spotlights were hot and bright. The raised dais and carefully draped couch were still empty, our pencils were all sharpened, there was a muttering in the life room. The tutor said, ‘Right then, who’s volunteering? One hour each, we’ll need five of you.’

It was 1989, early in the first term of my two years at Shelley Park1 art college, housed in the repurposed, characterful clifftop home of Percy Shelley, son of the writer Mary Shelley. The life drawing studio was on the top floor, accessed via a wide sweeping staircase, leading to the Photography, Graphics and Illustration studios, and then via a narrow flight to the garret, (originally for the servants, and reputed to be haunted by the ghost of a young chambermaid). This was the first time that term that a model had not turned up. Models were booked via an elaborate system of a self-appointed guardian of the list of Bournemouth artists’ models, and were supposed to let the hirer know if they would be delayed or unable to come, but before mobile phones or email, this did not always happen. I was one of the five who volunteered to model (clothed) for my classmates so that we could get a good day’s drawing in after all. The tutor said I could have a stretch half way through. I chose a reasonably comfortable pose, or so I thought, and settled in…

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, August 28th 2023.

Muse in me is at once like a guest, a meal and a wolf; consumed and consuming. At times hunkered down like a prepper with protein bars and weaponry, sometimes loose-limbed and striding out speaking in tongues to trees. Other times he is tight as wind-knots in fishing line, the hard place that will not run smoothly through the eye of life.

He likes (me) to fight, to fish, to wrestle, to draw, to write…

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, September 4th 2023.

This week has seen a series of unexpected events which have kept me by the sea’s edge and nowhere near this laptop. However, that now gives me an opportunity to share this letter to two friends from May 2021. There is a profound and sterile solipsism in the death-denying culture I am surrounded by, perhaps where you live, too. In a series of emails, we discussed death, life and the initiatory process, including the traditional, oracular place of childhood dreams of dismemberment and revivification, for those who would later be called to work in liminal realms.

This is followed by a 2022 rendering of a recurring childhood dream of mine, within the context of later life. Deepest good greetings to you wherever you are, from a sunny, warm day in East Dorset.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, September 11th 2023.

A series of interesting challenges has presented itself, one will be very public, others are private, and one regards health. All of them present the same conundrum at heart: how do I stand my ground using softness?

This seemingly oxymoronic term is used regularly by my T’ai Chi Master Mark Raudva as an elegant way of describing what an ideal yield in pushing hands is like: we neither lean nor incline, we do not resist, we turn around our upright central axis, we allow the push to turn us. On encountering this, a pusher who keeps doggedly pushing falls into emptiness, often loses their balance and must step or fall over, like Wile-e-coyote at the cliff’s edge. Whereas the person who connects, pays attention and yields, allows themself to be turned, is able to remain standing where they are without the use of force.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, September 25th 2023.

This afternoon was spent with my great friend Nick Hunt and his photogenic dog Otto. Years ago Nick stumbled upon a valley near Bath, the site of a now defunct ochre works which ran for hundreds of years. When he sent me the pictures of Otto’s red feet I could not believe the intensity of the colour, I had never seen anything like it. Within a week a parcel of uncanny weight arrived at my boat and on opening it I found the deepest red haematite powder, with mica sparkles. Imagine looking at a deep purple-red velvet cloth with tiny silver sequins spread across a woodland floor and you will get an idea of the sumptuousness of this pigment. That year, I went to collect a little for myself with Nick, and now we return when we meet to walk the public footpaths, visit the great trees, gather a little earth and to visit the wild bees whose hive is a gnarled oak.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, October 2nd 2023.

There is a pervasive contemporary opinion that feeling or expressing joy somehow makes you a ‘less serious person’. This is patently nonsense, akin to dismissing someone’s ideas because of their accent or dialect, which still happens widely in my country, (especially with people from the Midlands or the West Country being seen as coming across as somehow less intelligent). As a large, widely distributed species, much of humans’ strength and adaptability comes from the huge variety of ways we have historically moved about, communicated, procured food, or organised ourselves into groups. The almost infinite variation in local customs should be proof enough that there is no one right way to be a human and I personally advocate for the view that we will need all the myriad ways over the coming difficult times.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, October 9th 2023.

This week I want to gather a few things that stem from ordinary moments of neighbourliness, abundance, or lack, as well as the deeper storing, mending and testing that are appropriate for me in these times. I was due to post on this topic last week, but a little late is fine. Plus, I feel that the basket of foraged thoughts this week will be a little less sorted and tidied than usual, as reflects a woman with two cases at the door, full of coloured stones, oak galls and feathers.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, October 16th 2023.

The Door

There is a holy place where an impossible feeling resides. I used to name it euphoria, but it is not that, in the way moderns use it. It is the natural joy of many organisms, and now I see that it is not only human, but is everywhere. The cat turning over in the dusty sun, the swan hooting and puffing, the moment when the chords resolve only to suddenly suspend again, as in late Bach or early Björk. It is when the spirit descends, or when the guest arrives unbidden and stands stubbornly horned and pelt-clad at my side. This is where LeGuin wrote from, where Liz Fraser sang from and Pina Bausch danced from. It is where James Turrell makes his light and where Howard Hodgkin took five years to make one moss green mark. It is the mouth of an open volcano, the mud and ashes of my camp at first light. We wish to reside here, but we cannot stay. It is a paradox: a place which visits us which we as selves cannot visit. 

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, October 23rd 2023.

There will no brave solo hero like in films. Pervasive awareness and sustained attention are hardly telegenic. What must be borne, transformed, returned or achieved will be done by some ordinary people together and not by a maverick lone man or teenage girl who is gonna - godammit - save the day. It'll most likely be small groups, large groups, not necessarily even exclusively by humans. These people will be what we currently call friends. This friendship can include family, it can embrace the inanimate. Kindness will be appropriate. There will be stops for meals and tea. There will be backtracking and head-scratching, possibly snogging and most likely some fights, but mainly there'll be heart. Not only will it famously not be televised but neither will it be recognised or theorised. Commenters won't even apprehend it - we are as mould on bread to them. We are not available for their consumption, and we taint a bigot's daily bread with our fuzzy distasteful ways. There will be yielding, and this will be our resistance. There will be steadfastness and at the heart - true connexion.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, October 30th 2023.

This week I offer thoughts on how words can be written during wartime, (carefully, sincerely, mainly). I send warm greetings to those who read my dispatches, I appreciate all your emails and comments, thank you for joining me here. Also, many thanks again to the friends with whom I remain in many-years-long communion by email and other ways of connecting, in conversation with whom many of the thoughts I share here in my writing take shape, including this week’s. You all know who you are. I send you my love.

Philia is a wellspring of great joy which it is my honour to tend.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, November 6th 2023.

With my head in a fog, unable to sharpen my wits to finish the new essays, I offer instead two pieces from the last half decade of letters to friends around the loose theme of uncertainty, which cajoled my handful of functioning brain cells to put them together. When I publish emails here, I edit them only very lightly. Some pieces were originally off-the-cuff, others were serious replies in months-long back and forth conversations, yet others were plain outlandish, and words ran away with each other in little gangs. Occasionally I laugh when I reread them, or wince, or wonder how I ever knew or thought such a thing. But with these feral photons, I wanted to create a different kind of space for myself, and by extension, for my readers here on Substack, one that I had not yet found online but was experiencing in my network of friends and colleagues. Not tidy, but lively and somewhat shaggy, a place to roam and rant, but also to rest and consider. I hope you have found a little of that here, over the last year. I have.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, November 13th 2023.

A year and a day

In old tales we often hear the phrase ‘a year and a day’ to denote a magical, significant period of time, or a poetic way of saying that a year has passed by. Thirteen lunar months of twenty-eight days (13 x 28 = 364), plus one extra day is 365 days, a regular solar year. That is how long I will have been writing publicly here on Substack by Tuesday 21st November 2023. It feels far more magical to me than the bare figures signify, as over this year, my first book was published, I’ve earned over half my income from writing, and almost 3000 of you now subscribe to Uncivil Savant and regularly read my work here. I’ve been overwhelmed with the support and interest you have shown my writing. Thank you, especially to everyone who supports my work by being a paid subscriber. You are personally enabling me to work on my next book which, if all goes well, will be published in spring 2025.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, November 20th 2024.

For the first time in a year there is no Substack post due on a Monday morning. I have been cooking venison in many different ways all weekend for a group of 15 while my friend teaches her ‘using the whole animal’ course. Around me as I type, people nibble jerky, carve gorge-hooks for fishing from leg bones and paint designs on buckskin using a surprisingly excellent paint made from ochres and vitreous humour, aka deer eyeball juice.

Before my first planned post on the new fortnightly rhythm, here is a poetry interlude. Included are two from 2018 that feel appropriate to my life right now, amongst skilful friends. I feel deep gratitude for the natural materials, animals, earths, trees and plants who have provided my livelihood this week. Earth skills are essential life skills.

Fragments from a sandstone cliff face in early winter light.

1: I note the present impossibility of loving smoothly. The heart’s Archimedean screw, continually turning to bring up the flow. It must always be spiralling if you want there to be fresh water.

As though the heart’s turning is caused by some attachment to the gyring cosmos making it so.

Blessings never accrue enough to stop the need for them refilling.

I want the blackberries, so accept the thorns. They can be pulled out, replacing their amethyst juice with warm garnet blood. A fair exchange of liquid gems.

A faint anthelion lasted half an hour as I left the archipelago of Brigid2 in October. The promise of a wholeness that can only be glimpsed, not looked at directly. Pierced by a red kite so huge, I thought at first it was a heron.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 4th 2023.

It is a fact that no matter how well you try to live your life, there will be people who don’t like you. This is as natural and unavoidable as weather, and occasionally as unpleasant. Before the internet, and especially before mobile phones, kids could get away from bullies after school, workplace difficulties could be left behind for the evening, and the private sphere was actually still pretty much private, for ordinary people. Royalty, politicians and celebrities have received public commentary on their lives for longer, and perhaps in some ways, rightly so.

In the age of continual (self-)surveillance we are subject to opinion, approbation, cancelling, bullying, lies, misconstrual, out-of-context appropriations, vendettas; but also hype, compliments, adoration, ego-polishing and a hundred other kinds of less than wholesome interaction. People who write, make art, perform, or teach, or who otherwise make their livelihood in the public realm are particularly prone to this, compared to, say, an accountant. So in some ways, it’s a labour issue, if this is our place of work and we are harassed here. Now that one requires an online presence even to have the most modest of sustained creative careers, it has become almost impossible to just do your thing, and make your living locally by being good at it. That’s not a complaint, it’s just a description of how things are around here lately1, and you can read the same in any number of analyses.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, December 18th 2023.

From the beginning in November 2022, this Substack has included many letters and excerpts from letters which I have sent to my dear ongoing correspondents. I only give names or initials when I have received permission to do so. Sometimes it is correct to anonymise them. I write best by communicating with friends, the land of my home here in Wessex, with certain trees, or materials which call to me, such as ochre and chalk. I am never really thinking on my own. Who is? We are always in conversation with other writing, our culture, the past, the natural world, and everything we do not yet know about ourselves.

Today, I would like to share a recent letter to my friend, from a series which truly helped strengthen, then crystallise, a few new compounds that had previously been sloshing around only in weak solution.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 1st 2024.

Many thanks to Peco who last week wrote to me with an interesting question regarding the Taoist view on evil. Peco’s writing was some of the first I discovered on here, and, as I have written before, it often moves and educates me in equal measure, as does the writing of his wife Ruth.

In answer, I cannot write for all Taoists, and especially not for ‘Taoism’. These thoughts below are personal and partial, and based on practice of T’ai Chi and meditation as much as anything else.

But Tao is dear to me, as I fell into it at a young age and have practiced and studied for about 30 of the 40 intervening years. I find great wisdom in the teaching stories of The Taoist Classics, which I love as much as the parables of the New Testament. Later in the year I will return to today’s topic when I have had time to find all the references from the Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Wen Tzu, Tao Te Ching and other Classics which would round-out the piece. I hope to find room for it in the book I have begun to write about standing your ground using softness.1 But until then, here are notes towards such a chapter. I hope they are of interest, as for me, the nature of evil, wise versus unwise behaviour, and the role of intent, are frequent topics for thought.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 15th 2024.

As I walked out today, the great tits were already singing their spring songs: ‘I am here! See how fit and healthy I am! I wish to mate!’1 I had woken up with far too much love and nowhere to stow it. So, with a prayer and a wry smile, I laid my bundle at the door of The Great Mystery.

And then He said, ‘Tell them about that time I fixed your back.’

I spent a long time forgetting this, thereby resisting some kind of initiation. Now it’s time to stop running.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, January 29th 2024.

This week I am grieving my dear aunt, and cannot write.

We’re on an in-between-essays week, so here are four things for you, sent with care, sadness and bursts of feral joy, all mixed up, as befits such violent times. There’s a somewhat ranting letter to a friend from 2022, plus three poems against tyranny and empire, inner and outer. Here, Boudica stands for a correct, noble, defence of lifeways, kin and land, even if doomed. I see echoes of St Wite.

See you next week, and thank you for all the calls, comments and emails after last week’s piece, I appreciate everyone who reached out with their own outlandish stories of transformation and unknowing.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, February 5th 2024.

Talking with friends is like spring water to me, which also means I sometimes neglect it in favour of another cup of strong tea when I should return to the source… Some years, it can seem like our energy is scattered and broadcast in all directions. It can feel like all the work we are doing, the research, the admin, the writing, the organising, doesn’t seem to add up to anything, let alone something grand.

Talking with Dougald Hine last month, the image of a meadow came to mind, and set my heart at rest. Perhaps you too are sowing seeds by the handful, hoping that some of them will take. They will: not all of them, but some, for sure. Writing job applications or writing songs, digging an allotment, mending a marriage, organising a community event, making a living, studying, recovering from illness. Maybe this year will be a meadow year for you, a bit of this and that, a few weeks of flurry then a pause, for it all to begin again. It won’t look like much from the outside, or the inside, sometimes. Some days we’ll compare ourselves to illustrious friends and momentarily feel like failures. But one day by sunshine, grace and good rain, our meadow will bloom.

First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, February 12th 2024.

I have been grinding bone ash, marble dust, chalk, oyster shell white and ochre into various binders: gum Arabic, aquafaba, linseed oil, gum tragacanth, cherry tree gum, oat gruel… My cunning plan, to one day wean people off plastic marker pens when they see how great metal marks made on prepared grounds can look: bold, permanent, soft, shiny, grey, black, brown, golden… And so I mull things over on the slab while listening to this and this. The work is long and full of haptic richness, smashing, grinding, milling, then long strokes of the brush as I lay the grounds down on watercolour paper before making test marks on them next week. Shop-bought grounds are expensive and often made of acrylic (microplastics which go straight down the plughole, which is where the sea starts…) Tapping the sieve to let the yellow ochre through just enough to tint the various subtle whites. The splash of water droplets from a pipette before scooping them up with a palette knife on the speckled granite slab, a 1990s placemat from the charity shop.

First published here on Substack with more images and links on 19th February 2024.

The Dragon

In the Taoist Classics, dragons signify many things, depending on context, but the one I want to talk about is the sky dragon as the spirit of nature and the nature of spirit. In many Chinese artifacts and art you will see a joyful, sinuous dragon, mouth open, wide eyes, and wider smile, front legs outreaching with all its energy towards its goal - the pearl. What is this pearl? Well, talking of it with my old friend and T’ai Chi teacher Mark Raudva this weekend, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, ‘Ah, the mysterious pearl of great value…’

What it often represents is true wisdom.

How the dragon is portrayed shows us how we too could gather all our vitality, energy and spirit1 to pursue this great prize. That this is our true nature.

But our vitality is drained by the dopamine cycle. Our energy is wasted chasing complicated accoutrements and enervating experiences, which cannot replace simply being at home on the earth, which we ancestrally crave. Our spirits are tranquilised by fake ritual which numbs, but never kills, our longing for connection with each other, the living world and Great Mystery.

This was first published here on Substack on 26th February 2024, with full transcript, more images links and footnotes.

Fate

It's my fate to work with the fragmentary, the partial, detritus, the discarded and the unwanted.

Matter is holographic. If the Divine is in everything, then any one thing is a holograph of the whole. Completeness can be accessed through incompleteness more easily than through the search for completeness. Searching for ‘wholeness’ is a fool’s errand.2 Attention to the unwanted, the vestigial and the marginal always yields more than expected. The devil is not in the details, the devil is in the Grand Unified Theory. The Great Mystery is in the tiny details, the unforeseen events, the mysterious turns, the strange, small objects and strangers well-met on the path. It's found in the unexpected embrace, the impromptu dance, the fireside gathering bursting into song, the sudden meal assembled from scraps that tastes delicious, full of unlikely combinations: sausage and mango? Amazing.

This piece was originally posted here on Substack with full transcript, more images and links on 10th March 2024.

A month or so ago, David Knowles, a writer I love to read, asked me to write something about knowing, after I had written this in a short Note about an earlier piece:

Somewhere between the fort-town of Facts and the river of Knowing is a meadow where I gather leaves of wild faith.

I was making notes, mulling it over, as you do, when a friend died. Washed downstream into a gully of grief, several of us swam together and kept each other afloat. Now, on the banks of that peaty force, I sit to regather my thoughts and find them changed. I cannot write about epistemology1, not only because I have not read the requisite books, but also because I do not keep a kenning that could be culled and flayed thus.

So, I will describe some of the different ways I ever know anything, (if I ever do), as I have never tried to list them in words. Perhaps it will chime with how you know what you know.

Then, I will speak of a recent long moment spent outside time with my pack.

This piece was first published here on Substack on 25th March 2024, with full transcript, more images, links and footnotes.

On the seventh, and final, celebration of the anniversary of the initiatory circle of the Incorporation of Muse. Below are some extracts of the many meetings of the participatory Beings and the Mistress of the gathering basket. Losses are recouped. A new door opens. We draw a crooked line under everything with charcoal made from our brothers’ vines, and heave a glad sigh.

This week, an unknowable horizon beckons, we go to pack old hurts away and find them turned to thick black ink.

This post was first published here on Substack with full transcript, photos and footnotes on 8th April 2024.

I am in America, and inexplicably have no phone signal or data here despite paying for it, right after a couple of weeks in Italy.

Here at last are deep green thoughts beneath the Georgia trees, where it is hot and humid and the shade of early evening is welcome. Good conversation and wonderful birdsong fill the air. There is due to be a ‘Biblical storm’ tonight, so people are leaving the camp, but we are trusting in our new tent and the fact that in Britain’s south west, we’ve just had the wettest winter on record. So we don’t feel fazed. My belly is full of the quesadilla and refried beans I cooked on the little camping stove. I have hard seltzer beside me and my travelling friend in front of me. My beloved is 3600 miles away, and so I console myself with the real beauty that is present and the deep conviviality of the people around me.

May you feel it too.

This was first published here on Substack with full transcript, more photos and footnotes on 23rd April 2024.

Loose Ends

I am accustomed to being away from home, but it is a new and tricky thing travelling so far away when one’s love is 3600 miles and 5 hours east. Conversations between hosts, friends and strangers are woven together, the beloved is included. How do we stay in communion with what and whom are not physically present? How do we do this without drifting away from the present moment, from what is close at hand? Maintaining a thread between myself and family, friends or partner has been an ongoing conundrum over the many years where touring with bands or teaching T’ai Chi took me to Poland, Canada, USA, Scotland, Sweden or elsewhere. Now, older, though perhaps only marginally wiser, I realise the importance of puncturing the mystique of that perfect distance achieved by international travel. It can attenuate connection to a point at which it breaks. I have seen friends and myself swept up in that seemingly inviolable self-contained bubble which can accompany anything other than very low-budget travel. Marriages have faltered. Bands have broken up. What starts as a semi-mystical experience soon becomes an excuse for not bringing ourselves fully back home even as we dump our dusty bags by the front door.

In the recent past I have sat on one end of a string and felt nothing but emptiness greet my hopeful pulls. At other times I have let my own loose end dangle, ignoring the tension in the line, refusing to be in connexion, and yet expecting to be able to pick it up on my return.

But these are not those times, thank goodness. So I will write of host-guesting and then of a shawl the size of an ocean.

This podcast was published first here on Substack, with full transcript, notes and links on 6t May 2024.

Aspirant

I have long been in search of a way to write about the real1 without lapsing lazily into superlatives nor anatomising a now-lifeless corpse of the beloved. I have a duty to speak for wisdom only accessible by the body and to somehow say-into-being the unspeakable, and to not just allow, but speak up for, the flawed, the exiled, the tiny, the marginal.

The untethered word is to the real what the virtual world is to lived reality: merely a representation. When words are true, they remain nestled into the fabric of being, connected by an umbilicus to the matrix of real life. When they have finished being useful they can and should return to the nourishing silence that surrounds all speech and action.

The Great Mystery is in all things.4 Matter matters. Sacrifice involves physical loss, even death. The container of insight is material, even though the insight is immaterial. This is the great paradox of embodiment, the heart of all wisdom traditions worth their salt, the current lack of which makes empty husks of men, women and children.

This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, images, notes and links on 20th May 2024.

Mind sneaks glances from behind the door of the room where heart and hope lay sleeping in a tangle. Lists accrue in layers on the desk as chestnut pollen tints the bay window yellow and further warms the (already golden) evening sunlight to a tone not seen since Proserpina’s last return. I have three more days of the very best company before I must make my third Lenten month of the year and work and only work. So, poems, pilgrimage and images are how I can be here with you this week, in one of those occasional interludes. Discursive brain cells rest, knowing they will be needed soon, and so are currently lounging in long grass, chewing stalks. The nettles in the abandoned churchyard are growing longer and shortly will be picked for cordage, as the Schumacher College course is full and I cannot scrimp on twist away, pull towards, twist away, pull towards materials.

The phenomenal world is ever present. We are not lost in thoughts and words do not steal energy from events. What is said is what is already being done. We bow to the day and to each other, to the sun, the Great Mystery and to Providence. In west Dorset, the Milky Way roared above us at 3am. Outdoors for a pee, my old glasses permitted only a blurry Plough and Cassiopeia, but we could still orient ourselves well enough and laughed southwards, sky-clad, ridiculous.

This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, links and images on June 3rd 2024.

Pax Corporis

Your body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending.1

You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it.2 3

It is not a peripheral matter that the intelligence beaming out of you at this moment, meeting my words in that ancient embrace of sense-making together, (like strangers clasping hands and forearms to make a new peace), is embodied.4

Embodiment is not an accident, a trap, a curse, a trick, an inconvenience. The Great Mystery is not mistaken, and neither is everyone who loves you.

Do not worry that you are a body for no reason. Your ability to reason depends upon your body, as everything you can conceive of is measured by a proportion you learned before you could speak, when you were quickest making sense.

You are not trapped in a body, you were not born in the wrong body. There are no wrong bodies.

If your body is in pain, even in chronic pain, is injured, exhausted, ill or dying, is damaged, is unwieldy, unwilling, unwanted, then remember you remain in good, ordinary company at the endlessly long feasting table of life. All of us will one day be most of these things, or already have been.5 Indeed, it is why we can have any compassion for anyone else.6

This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, images and links on 10th June 2024.

It is summer 1985 and I am crouched in a dusty attic bedsit at the top of a large, run-down Victorian building in Bournemouth, peering at the bookshelf wedged behind a potter’s wheel. Worn paperbacks I have never seen before are in a row: Tao - The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts, Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphries, several books by Idries Shah including the exploits of Mulla Nazruddin, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi, A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach, poems of Hafez and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps. 1

‘You can borrow what you like, any time. Just bring them back when you’re done,’ says Pete.2 I pull out The Watercourse Way and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones and start flicking through them. I am drawn to the picture of an empty circle and look at it, transfixed. What is this? I ask myself. Why are the drawings of ox herding interrupted by an empty frame? Slightly horrified by a creeping sense that I might not know anything near as much as I think I do about… anything, I pick up the second book, and read,

“[T]he world as described is included in but is not the same as the world as it is. As a way of contemplation, it is being aware of life without thinking about it, and then carrying this on even while one is thinking, so that thoughts are not confused with nature.”

What is life without thinking? Who am I if not this narrative voice telling myself everything as it happens? Hastily, I stash the books in my army-surplus satchel and offer to make a cup of tea, already always the serving girl. These are questions I’ll shelve for twenty years, while I make myself busy with doing.

This podcast was first published here on Substack June 24th 2024 with full transcript, footnotes, photos and links. Photo credit: Jonny Randall

This moment

You are at your desk and your hands, shoulders and eyes feel so tired. You roll your shoulders back and squint at the screen, did it always seem so blurry? Your partner comes in bringing a cup of tea wondering when you’ll be free to help with a small household task. The cat stretches lazily by the door and requests, with an exceptionally sweet ‘raaorll’, that she would like to be let out, to prowl her inscrutable night paths.

So many requests in a day, from our loved ones, from the wild world, from our bodies: are these things truly separate, anyway?

Our requests for aid, for freedom, for connection, for movement and for love are entirely natural, infinitely nuanced and secreted within the most mundane of everyday activities. To spot the influence of the tender heart of our beloved in the angle of a tea mug handle’s placement is to discover a fairy door to the kingdom of Grace. There, we may find that the royal throne is only one of the props in an endless game of musical chairs, where somehow giving up our seat with good humour, while paradoxically giving our all to the frantic dash, is the opportunity to laugh and drink from the side lines with all the other creatures. Here, we watch just a few craven humans cling to their driver’s seats, thrones and presidencies, not realising the whole point of the game was to stay in motion with the others and to end up laughing so much we could barely stand and may even spill our cup of punch.

This podcast was first published on Substack on 12th July 2024 with full transcript, links, images and footnotes.

It is time to write the last of these See With the Body Eye pieces for a while, and to return to the implicit over the explicit again, next week. Last night for an online talk I gave for PRI, it was both a joy and a big leap for me to be so ‘out’ about my inspirations and sources of sustenance for the work that is mine to do in the world. In a few week’s time I hope to share the recording and the resources. But for now, it is just good to know the week ahead comprises days in an ancient octagonal keep in deep work with the Philosopher’s Stone, lapis lazuli, while evenings will be spent quietly editing my next book Drawn From the Wild. One cannot only breathe out.

I look forward to meeting some of you in person for the online workshop on 3rd August, details are in last week’s post. In the meantime, let us step out, and in, together into the labyrinth which is pilgrimage.

This podcast was first published on July 22nd 2024 here on Substack with links, images, and full transcript.

I-thou

This ‘you’ I am writing to, it’s really ‘thou’ or ‘ye’ or ‘thee’.

I tried ‘I’ and ‘my’ for this piece but that’s not it, and using ‘we’ would assume far too much. So, rather than affect an archaic pronoun that would get in the way of communication, I must address ‘you’, but not in an accusatory way. This ‘you’ includes the part of me to which I write when I also write to you.

English is a strange and speckled beast and when not quick to heel, turns to sniff old walls and piss on them. But it is my beast and I must walk with it. I won’t use a choke chain, and besides, it wouldn’t help. Disciplining English only makes it howl.

So, this week I have questions and a poem. The questions are mine and the great poem is by a friend and fellow ‘what is this I am doing today, is it writing / music / poetry / art?’ person David Benjamin Blower. I asked him if I could read you one of his poems, of the several that jumped out during his performance two weeks ago. His words reached into my glassware cupboard, pulled out a goblet and filled it with good wine, which I have been drinking all week.

He said yes.

This podcast was first published here on Substack on August 12th 2024 with full transcript, footnotes and links.

I am away somewhere there is no electricity. I come to town to look at this screen, drink coffee and send pictures to my mum.

Here are three fruits from my larder of letters, thoughts, poems. I send greetings from a day with SSE winds and an abundance of bats at dusk. The mackerel’s bellies are full of baby sprats, a first. The local swimmers report huge silver shoals of them around their legs. The grey seal rested all day yesterday and gazed at us with huge black eyes. I watched the rise and fall of its sighing bulk and found myself exhaling in time. Mammals relax in similar ways. This morning I returned to the flat rock near where it had lain and spent a good ten minutes on my side enjoying a vertical horizon.

This podcast was first published on Substack on 27th August 2024 with more images, links and a full transcript.

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This week I am sat here at my desk with a hard stone in my belly. I could write what I would have written and not mention the chill in my guts, but apart from plainly being false, it would also not serve anyone. Perhaps I will always be a teacher at heart, like both my siblings and most of my cousins, aunts and uncles. To fight the explicatory urge to find lessons in almost everything would be as futile as pulling out my own thumbnail. I’d be useless for a while and it’d only grow back. And then I’d find it was a perfect metaphor for…

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This post was published here on Substack on 10th September 2024 with links, footnotes and images.

I want to write about music and silence. It’s a few weeks earlier than planned, as yesterday I got the heads up from Lydia Catterall that our episode on her podcast Survival Songs was coming out on Sunday 22nd September, a month before I expected. So why not listen to that now, before reading this? You can click here. It’s only 20 minutes long and it’ll give you more depth on some of the topics in today’s post.

Have you ever just stopped doing a thing you really loved for a decade? What happened when you came back to it? Had anything changed?

Links to the song mentioned in the podcast: Mount the Air - The Unthanks.

Scroll to bottom of the original post for The Shape of Prayer - Tells.

And here’s the Survival Songs podcast homepage.

This podcast was first published here on Substack on 23rd September 2024 with full transcript, footnotes and links.

This week is a between-essays week. Here are two short fiction sketches, written in 2007 and 2015, and recent photographs from near my home and from a very nourishing week in Suffolk. Greetings from sunset hour in York, where I am away working on the last edits for my next book. Back with a longer piece and ‘this week’s good thing’, next week. Go well, all, into the season’s change.

Thanks for listening to Uncivil Savant. To receive invitations to online classes and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.

This podcast was first publish here on Substack on 30th September 2024 with full transcript, links and footnotes.

Why do you write?

Why I write depends on what I am writing; there is a vast difference between why I first wrote a book about natural art materials4 and why I write this Substack5. Similarly, the reasons why I wrote a T’ai Chi blog for my students for 15 years6 and why I write song lyrics7 have barely anything in common. That is ‘why’ as motivation or hoped-for outcome. That’s not quite what I’m stalking.8

About 3 hours ago, I finished writing and illustrating my second book, after six months’ work and a further six months’ preparation. I’d had a good day at the drawing board9, finishing pastel, metal point and charcoal drawings for various sections, and the last of the element logos. I thought I’d take myself out for a coffee and a cake to celebrate but had left it too late in the day and so headed down the wooded walk to the clifftop to clear my head. Apart from awaiting a few images from guest artists and writing some captions when they are all in place, the main work of Drawn From The Wild is over for me, and the designers can take charge until it’s time to proofread.10

Having just spent my first two full days drawing since March, and despite the deep pleasure of that, it feels very clear that my creative energy seeks out words and that has not changed over my two years on Substack.

So, in lieu of coffee and cake, which will have to wait until morning, I am celebrating by making two of my favourite things, a list and copious footnotes.

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This post was first published here on Substack on October 7th 2024 with full transcript, photos and copious footnotes.

Where the Light Falls

Look again at the growth rings in the photo above. Notice how slender and crowded they are in the top of the circle compared to the area on the lower-left. This tree was likely felled near where it was used, near North Adams, Massachusetts, sometime in the late nineteenth century. In heavily forested areas like the hills and valleys around the Hoosic river, conifers such as pine and spruce grew tall and were used in buildings as pillars, structural timbers and flooring. At Mass MOCA I could have filled my camera reel with pleasingly crunchy textures from almost every post-industrial wall, flaky painted pillar or unevenly glazed old bricks, but this tiny section of floor stole the show, despite the array of art visible in every direction.

Listen on for more on music, friendship and knowing which way you are growing.

This podcast was first published with full transcript, photos, links and footnotes here on Substack on 4th November 2024. No AI is used in the creation of my writing.

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Ordinary people, artists, creators, farmers, workers, parents, lovers… we did not ask for AI but it was made to seem inevitable, first by Science Fiction and Horror books and films, where at least it was almost always solidly critiqued. Later it was made real by the tech overlords of Silicon Valley whose inhumane imaginations2 have set loose artificial species of energy sucking-ticks, of livelihood removal-ticks, of truth replacement-ticks.

I’ve had it with the enshittification of the internet. It is almost impossible to look things up easily and effectively any more. Those of you who know me in what we 1970s kids still quaintly call ‘real life’, will know that I am not usually a complainer: if I want something done or changed, I generally just go and do it myself. Can’t get a record label? Start one. Want more people to get excited about using natural art materials and not plastic ones? Write a book, or two, about it and then go round in person and teach it. But I can’t make myself a new internet. Even my brother, author of the UK’s most widely used school technology textbooks can’t do that, and he can make most things. That’s possibly beyond almost anyone’s power, now. I’d be happy with the old one back, from about 2006, perhaps.

This podcast was first published here on Substack on November 11th 2024 with full transcript, images, links and footnotes.

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A Door

Yielding to Land1 is a rigorous art. To make yourself soft to a hard place is to open something akin to opening a faery-door - not some pretty fabrication glued to a tree by a well-meaning parent - but a gaping cave mouth in reality. There is darkness in there and the possibility of madness beside the real prize, wisdom. There is also a price to pay: everything you had constructed on top of the ground of yourself, before.

Wisdom flows downhill, like water. Unless you lower yourself, and present something empty, you cannot gather it…

This podcast was first published here on Substack on December 2nd 2024, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.

Trespasses

On one of the first mornings of January 2024 I woke from a dream which had only the simplest and starkest of content. Instead of my usual dream adventures, quests, meetings and challenges, there was simple black text on white in bold capitals-

A YEAR OF FORGIVENESS OF DEBT

No sound, no commentary. I opened my eyes and made a note of the words but I needn’t have bothered, as they have stayed with me all year like a guilty secret. I turn around and the words are still there, now like a promise rather than a threat.

This podcast was first published with full transcript, footnotes and links here on Substack on December 18th 2024.

I begin writing this from within a storm.

Hogmanay was cancelled in Edinburgh and most towns in the country were battered by high winds when New Years’ Eve parties and fireworks were due to be in full swing. A sou’ westerly blows hard and fast up the English Channel and greets my windows with a thousand salty kisses. I just gathered rosemary from the overgrown bushes in the clifftop gardens and snuck a peek at the sea: whitecaps as far as the eye can see, which to be fair, isn’t far. New Year swimmers are scant, the extant ones are smug after a ninja dip. What spirit!

The rain began as I wrote the word ‘watershed’, an ideal synchrony.

After Epiphany the new plans, essays and news will be ready to share with you, here at Uncivil Savant.

Today, an embrace and a loving glance at possible landscapes of mind.

This podcast was originally published here on Substack on 2nd January 2025, with full transcript, footnotes, links and images.

Uncivil Savant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, podcasts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.

Caught as we are in the seasonal gales of bawling and chest-beating of barely literate tyrants, there is much we cannot hear. Where I live, this last week of storms has left the low tide strand scoured and giant boulders half the size of cars are strewn about the upper shore, going nowhere. Meanwhile, and for some months, I have been considering the three seemingly unpopular qualities after which I named this piece.

On these Isles, both the pagan religions that arrived by foot over Doggerland or by boat across the North Sea, or via the newly formed English Channel, and the religions of One God that came here by curragh from Ireland, then by ship and plane, have a deep current in common: the communal telling of stories of great lives. At differing times, or at overlapping nights around the fire, tales of heroes, goddesses, gods, kings, saints and villains were told, and the way in which these tales could inspire or instruct were at each time largely held in common. The ground water of these tales were the one great aquifer common to our thousand islands. Springs sprung up differently here and there; a variant, a telling detail, a differing parentage, a new tale seeping in. But it was clear that self-sacrifice for family, friends, kin, village, or for your principles, to give hospitality to ordinary people, giving away what was precious to the down-trodden or the hungry, were seen as good and noble things. This is as common in ancient myths I have read and heard as it is in words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Until very recently, these qualities were seen as universally good amongst all but followers of Machiavelli…

This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, footnotes, links and photos on Monday 3rd February 2025.